The mystical island of Lemnos levitated off the coast of Erebus’s northernmost tip. On it, a field of beautiful but deadly poppies stretched and beyond it stood a cave fitted with two chimneys; one made of polished ivory and the other made of buckhorn.
Inside the cave, the white wizard Somnos the Sandman sat in his workshop concocting dreams. He brewed them in a cauldron after trickling invisibly from jars labeled with the most curious names: Nest of Snakes, Unfaithful, Freefall, Pursuit, Tooth Fairy, The Emperor’s New Clothes, Icarus Wings, Back to School…
Somnos placed the best fusions on the topmost shelves where they softly projected their contents against the wall like brief and cyclical shadow plays. In the current iteration of Erebus, which had a very high frame rate per second and was more coherent, less surreal but more deceptive, Somnos had in fact become obsolete. Out of habit, the wizard carried on crafting the dream episodes all the same.
Somnos watched over the entire dream-realm through his looking-glass ball, which gave him the power to see any part of Erebus at any given moment; from the excess-loving Centaurs in the east to the ethereal and amoral Sylphs in the west to the nomadic and artisanal tribes of Cyclopes in the mountain ranges. One thing he hadn’t anticipated though was the presence of the Faceless Horseman.
The Faceless Horseman intermittently flickered into bundles of ones and zeroes and galloped in and out of the mapped zone. His mount was skeletal and trailed fire from its nostrils. The rider wore oversized, spiked pauldrons and a long tattered blood-red cape that appeared to defy gravity. He was unhelmed but gave the impression of someone wearing black stockings over his head.
Except that was his head.
The Faceless Horseman was a cipher, a dim entity, which in the Japanese language of the early game developers consisted of two kanjis ("yū" and "rei") and also denoted a ghost.
While Somnos the Sandman’s back was turned, the looking-glass ball locked and zoomed in on the Faceless Horseman. The Faceless Horseman halted abruptly as though becoming aware of the surveillance for the first time. The rider turned his head towards the looking-glass ball’s invisible sensor, his void face filling the sphere and blotting it out.
The Faceless Horseman was outside looking in.
****
In all his eighteen years in this world, nobody had ever paid their undivided attention to Raphael “Rafa” Cruz.
Grownups liked to talk about how Earth’s running out of rainforests, ice caps or pandas. To a busker and petty thief like Rafa, the only resource that truly mattered was human attention. When he wasn’t using it to his advantage, he was usually competing for it. People nowadays were glued to their smartphone screens or lost in their own worlds between their wireless earphones. They played their own choice of music and frowned on the use of amplifiers in public spaces.
That was the first rule of busking and pickpocketing right there: respect other people’s turf. Don’t be the dipstick who got in people’s faces. As a thief or grifter especially, don’t go starting a turf war that you couldn’t finish, and be careful not to fleece the herd too much if you didn’t want your world to suddenly get smaller. You’d get too much heat from the po-po and then not even your protection money to the Red Domino could save you.
The thing about picking pockets that had really grown on Rafa is, especially when he was with his crew and they were on a roll, it almost felt like a choreographed dance. First, Jamal, their “fearless leader”, was the shade. He constantly wore a pair of shades himself, not because he was posing as a blind beggar but because he was hiding his restless, roving eyes.
In the packed MRT car presently, Jamal stepped into a straphanger’s personal space and set off all kinds of alarm. This, at least to Rafa, was akin to a performer engaging the audience. It didn’t matter whether it was welcome or not. Jamal put the mark at ease by standing next to him and pretending to watch a YT vid of cats. The mark also stole a peek at Jamal’s smartphone.
People had their guard up against sleight-of-hand and misdirection but they never doubted their own perception; what was in their control, what was familiar and “real”. In this case, the sea of faces where one went to disappear and to dismiss.
Shielded by Jamal, Rafa lifted the mark’s wallet and passed it behind him to Eman. Discreetly inside his black gym bag, Eman fished the credit cards out of the bifold. He swiped them in a skimmer. That was what Eman was good at: card games, chess, PC games and hacking. Finally, Rafa returned everything to the mark’s back pocket without anyone being the wiser.
A practical distance from the three of them, stood their lookout: Krystal, both cute and sexy in dreadlocks, a crop top and a pair of Daisy Dukes. If she was alone, she’d very likely be attracting gropers and molesters beyond the usual head-turners. Right now she was scanning the crowd to make sure there was no guy who A. was alert to the goings-on in the MRT car and B. wanted to play hero or, worse, C. was a cop in plain clothes. Krystal was the only rose among the thorns of their crew and Rafa and Jamal were rivals for her attention. Or at least they liked to think of themselves as such while Krsytal was oblivious to both of them.
At this point, the crew was playing with the spotlight and the blind spots around it. The mark’s awareness of reality. That was where Rafa, Jamal, Krsytal and Eman existed. They trod in the spaces where their fellow human beings seldom turned their gazes. The parks at night were their office, along with the pee-smelling overpasses and rat-infested underpasses.
Again, Rafa was reminded of dance, or at least busking. Because they weren’t professionals on a stage, they didn’t rob people using the power of institutions. They could choose to be in the shadows or the light. This was what really got him and why he thought being a pickpocket was the job destined for him. His family name Cruz was a fake one after all. It had been assigned to him by a social worker and a judge. It aptly meant “cross” because he had never known his biological parents and no Forever Family ever took enough interest in him, until he finally aged out of foster care. As for his first name, the old nuns at the boys’ home had named him after Saint Raphael the Archangel, who, according to the Bible stories that the nuns were so keen on, had the power to heal the blind. In a word, Rafa was supposed to have the power to bring light to the sightless or to keep them in darkness.
When he was busking was when Rafa felt happiest. Jamal and Eman would laugh their butts off if he ever told them his dream but he thought he could be a professional dancer someday; maybe a backup dancer to some famous celebrity or something. Rafa couldn’t blame the other guys. Looking at where they were now, becoming a professional dancer sounded as realistic as riding a rocket to the moon. Rafa lassoed his wandering thoughts back to what they were doing. Needless to say, the game they were playing was very dangerous. One wrong move and they could end up in juvie. They were changing MRT cars at Cubao Station. Between the four of them, they had a dozen Beep cards, which translated to unlimited time mingling with the sheep and fleecing them. The golden time was the panicky seconds of boarding and exiting the train. People were so focused on watching their steps and getting to where they were going that they forgot to pay attention to the constant pressure around their wrist, which was
Rafa took in the dim lights and the muted sounds of the city that acted like a baby – little by little quieting down but still refusing to fall asleep. The stores were shuttered and their footsteps rang hollow on the sidewalk. The only people still awake were in it for the long haul: security guards and call center agents on night shift. The cars in these parts were mostly taxis, and getting fewer and farther in between. The sound of their tires gripping the asphalt crescendoed and then decrescendoed perfunctorily, their passengers eager to get home to a warm meal or a soft bed, neither of which he or Eman had. They passed by a 24-hour diner that was empty except for a single customer. The overhead TV was broadcasting a talk show interview in the US. Eman grabbed Rafa’s arm in tightening excitement. They stopped to peer through the glass wall of the diner. “That’s Alex Chase!” Eman squealed. Alexander Chase was the world-famous general manager of OmniSys, which had produced OS Athen
By default, the world was auto-populated by sheep, but every once in a while there came a remarkable individual like Alexander Chase who moved and shook it. At the young age of twenty, he changed the world when he took OmniSys to new heights of greatness as the inventor of OS Athena, the world’s first AI operating system. Sixteen years later, he changed it again by introducing SKYE to billions of astonished televiewers across the globe. The projection screen in the studio of American syndicated talk show The Sofa became a literal window into the mind of host Beverly Stanton. Scenes were broadcasted live while being perceived from a first-person perspective: Stanton’s. The feed fully captured the memory or dream but it had none of the jarring and alienating quality of a First-Person Perspective game, which was a common genre of VR. It was like found footage recorded by the steadiest and yet most mobile camera. The global audience felt it was too good to be real but they couldn’t stop
They were back on the empty streets. Rafa tucked both his hands in the pockets of his hoodie, looking a bit shackled from the way the lower front of the hoodie was bulging. He hung his head. Meanwhile, Eman looked shaken after hearing the announcement of the winners. There had been two girls, one British and one Nigerian, and two boys, one French and one Brazilian. The gender of the last was still unknown but his nationaliy had already been announced. The last winner was from Rafa’s and Eman’s own country: the Philippines. “Can you believe it?” Eman muttered. “A Filipino actually won the lottery.” “Yeah, mind blowing,” Rafa said with a rather contradictory blasé expression. “It was a bit embrassing for OmniSys though when they couldn’t verify the Filipino’s identity. I mean, is that the perfect, most pathetic example of an only-in-the-Philippines moment or what?” “No, this is actually good news,” Eman said as though thinking aloud, with burning impatience. “I can work with this. The
Their celebration was short-lived because a blacked-out van screeched to a stop at the mouth of the alley. Three figures got off. All of them were wearing balaclavas and black jackets. “Anyone here order a beatdown?” one of the men called out and then laughed. Rafa recognized the voice of Saul, leader of the Red Domino. “I didn’t want to believe it,” Saul shouted. “My protégés stealing from me. From me. You remember what you were like when I first found you? You two were fresh out of foster care. Green as grass. The streets were fixin’ to eat you alive.” “Whatever we owed you,” Eman shouted back, “we paid back a hundred times over.” There was just the slightest tremor of fear in his voice. “You ingrates,” Saul said. “Thanks to this li’l stunt of yours, now I gotta make an example of you to the rest of the kids. I’m gonna teach you a lesson you’ll never forget. You won’t be able to walk for days after the beatdown I give you.” Rafa slipped his right hand behind his back and
Rafa grimaced on his back. A bare face was floating over him. He could see it through his one good eye. His whole face felt raw. He recognized the face, looming and large, as Saul’s. At the moment, the gangster was peering down at Rafa but Saul’s own eyes were puffy. {You’re not gonna be parading us to the other kids today,} Rafa blustered in a remote, detached section of his brain. Just behind that section, another panicky voice was asking: {Where’s Eman? Is he okay?} He attempted to lift his head from the hard concrete but was met with almost electric pain so he gave up. Instead, he focused on Saul’s face above him. Saul’s eyes were nearly closed and there was a largish hole in the front of his jacket where the pillbox had exploded. Rafa thought he could see all the way through the hole to the shirt Saul had on underneath, which was also blackened with soot. Like Clark Kent in mid-transformation into Superman. Rafa grinned at the thought but even that simple effort brought a worl
The American, Alex Chase, was highly efficient. It appeared there was no wrinkle he couldn’t iron out. As soon as he had established that Rafa was indeed the adopted son he wanted, he started fixing everything up. It still wasn’t clear to Rafa and Eman how Alex Chase could know that with such conviction, but as long as it led to a Forever Family for Rafa, who was now close to aging out, all the orphans of Señora Inmaculada Concepcion boys’ home were going to be the good little angels they were advertised to be and not ask so many questions. Rafa couldn’t explain it but it was as though destiny was working on Alex Chase’s side too. It felt like God had been saving Rafa in the boys’ home for exactly eighteen years. Like a dog in the shelter, he had been passed up and rejected countless times just so he could finally meet Alex Chase. All orphans hated that feeling – well, at least those old enough to understand. It was the fear of being picked last, or not being picked at all. Of not de
“There were no CCTV cameras at the scene of the incident,” Krystal whispered conspiratorially. “The public thinks you’re a law-abiding citizen that got mugged. You fought tooth and nail against the mugger to keep your Omnifone and killed him in self-defense.” “Mugger? Are you talking about Eman? Is that Saul’s version of what happened?” “No, the idea came from Ate (Big Sis) Hazel… She…” Rafa opened his mouth to ask more questions, but speak of the Devil and she would appear with impeccable timing. “Ah! The medical miracle is awake,” a woman in her late twenties greeted as she sauntered in looking like a fitness motivator more than anything else. “I’m Hazel Garcia. Please just call me Big Sis Hazel. I figured you were much too young to know any lawyers so I came here to volunteer my services.” Rafa didn’t need the introduction. Attorney Hazel was a household name in the Philippines. She was a social media personality who rose to prominence through her YouTube channel called "Ask A